I aim a short baton. Although the baton looks like the kind of swagger stick a minor Trojan commander might carry, this is not Captain Echepolus’ property; it is mine, standard issue for us scholics. The baton is actually a taser and a shotgun microphone, picking out and amplifying sound from as much as two miles away, feeding the pickup to the hearplugs I wear whenever I’m on the plains of Ilium.
Agamemnon is giving his dying brother one hell of a eulogy. I see him cradle Menelaus’ head and shoulders in his arms and hear him go on about the terrible vengeance he—Agamemnon—will wreak on the Trojans for the murder of noble Menelaus, after which he laments about how the Achaeans will—despite Agamemnon’s bloody vengeance—lose heart, give up the war, and take their black ships home after Menelaus dies. After all, what’s the use of rescuing Helen if her cuckolded husband is dead? Holding his moaning brother, Agamemnon plays the prophet—“But the plowlands here in Priam will feed your flesh to the worms and rot your bones, O My Brother, as you lie dead before the unbreached walls of Troy, your mission failed.” Cheery stuff. Just the kind of thing a dying man wants to hear.
“Wait, wait, wait,” grunts Menelaus through gritted teeth. “Don’t bury me so fast, big brother. The arrowhead’s not lodged in a mortal spot. See? It penetrated my bronze war-belt and got me in the love handle I’ve been meaning to lose, not in the balls or belly.”
“Ahh, yes,” says Agamemnon, frowning at the wound where the arrow has only lightly penetrated. He almost, not quite, sounds disappointed. The whole eulogy is moot now and it sounded as if he’d worked on it for a while.
“But the arrow is poisoned,” gasps Menelaus as if trying to cheer his brother up. Menelaus’s red hair is matted with sweat and grass, his golden helmet having rolled away when he fell.
Standing, dropping his brother’s shoulders and head so quickly that Menelaus would have crashed back to the ground if his captains had not caught him, Agamemnon shouts for Talthybius, his herald, and orders the man to find Machaon, Asclepius’ son, Agamemnon’s own doctor and a damned good one, too, since Machaon is supposed to have learned his craft from Chiron, the friendly centaur.
Now it looks like any battlefield from any age—a fallen man screaming and cursing and crying as the pain begins to flow through the initial shock of injury, friends on one knee gathered around, helpless, useless, then the medic and his assistants arriving, giving orders, pulling the barbed bronze head out of ripping flesh, sucking out poison, packing clean dressings on the wound even while Menelaus continues to scream like the proverbial stuck pig.
Agamemnon leaves his brother to Machaon’s ministrations and goes off to rouse his men to combat, although the Achaeans—even without Achilles in their ranks today—seem hung over and angry and surly and in little need of a rousing to get them to fight.
Within twenty minutes of Pandarus’s ill-conceived arrow shot, the truce is over and the Greeks attack Trojan lines along a two-mile stretch of dust and blood.
It’s time for me to get out of Echepolus’ body before the poor son of a bitch catches a spear in the forehead.
I don’t remember much of my real life on Earth. I don’t remember if I was married, if I had children, where I lived—except for murky images of a book-lined study where I read my books and prepared my lectures—nor all that much about the university I taught at in Indiana, except images of stone and brick buildings on a hill with a wonderful view to the east. One of the odd things about being a scholic is that fragments of non-scholic-essential memories do return after months and years, which may be one of the reasons the gods don’t allow us to live that long. I am the oldest exception.
But I remember classes and my students’ faces, my lectures, some discussions around an oval table. I remember a fresh-faced young woman asking, “But why did the Trojan War go on so long?” I also remember being tempted to point out to her that she had been raised in an era of fast food and fast wars—McDonald’s and the Gulf War, Arby’s and the war on terrorism—but that in ancient days, the Greeks and their foes would no more think of hurrying a war than of rushing through a fine meal.
Instead of insulting my students’ attention spans, I explained to the class how these heroes had welcomed battle—how one of their words for combat was charme, which came from the same root as charo—“rejoice.” I read to them a scene in which two warriors facing one another were described as charmei gethosunoi—“rejoicing in battle.” I explained the Greek concept of aristeia—warrior-to-warrior or small-group combat in which an individual can show his valor—and how important it was to these ancients and how the larger battle would often pause so that the soldiers on each side could witness such examples of aristeia.
“So like, you mean, like,” stammered one fresh-faced female student, her brain running in place, her stammer illustrating that irritating speech and thought defect that spread like a virus among young Americans during the end of the Twentieth Century, “like the war would have, like, been over a lot sooner if they hadn’t kept, like, stopping for this ariste-whatchamacallit?”
“Precisely,” I had said with a sigh, looking at the old Hamilton clock on the wall in the hope of deliverance.
But now, after more than nine years watching aristeia in action, I can say in certainty that these one-on-one combats so beloved by both Trojans and Argives are one of the reasons for this prolonged, endless, slow-as-molasses siege. And like even the most sophisticated Middle American traveling too long in France, one of my urges now was to get back to fast food—or, in this case, fast war. A little bombing, a little airborne invasion, bim, bang, thank you ma’am, home to Penelope.
But not this day.
Echepolus is the first Trojan captain to die in the Achaean attack.
Perhaps it is because the man is still groggy and disoriented after my borrowing of his body, but as his group of Trojan fighters closes with a Greek group led by Nestor’s son Antilochus, a good friend of Achilles, poor Echepolus is slow to raise his long spear, so Antilochus thrusts first. The bronze spearpoint hits Echepolus’ horsehair helmet right at the ridge and drives down through his skull, popping one eye out and driving the man’s brains out between his teeth. Echepolus goes down, as Homer likes to say, like a toppled tower.
Now begins a dynamic I’ve seen all too often, but which never ceases to fascinate me. The Greeks and Trojans fight for reasons of honor first, it is true, but booty comes in a close second. These men are professional warriors; killing is their work and plunder is their pay. A large part of both honor and plunder is the elaborate, beautifully tooled armor—shield, breastplate, greaves, war belt—of their fallen foes. Capturing an enemy’s gear is the heroic Greek equivalent of a Sioux warrior’s counting coup on an opponent, and much more lucrative. At the very least, a captain’s protective gear is made of precious bronze, and—for the more important officers—it is often hammered out of gold and decorated with jewels.
And thus the fight begins for dead Captain Echepolus’ gear.
An Achaean commander named Elephenor rushes in, grabs Echepolus’ ankles, and begins dragging the gory corpse back through the melee of spears and swords and crashing shields. I’ve seen Elephenor around the Achaean camp over the years, watched him fight in lesser skirmishes, and I have to say that the man’s name suits him—he’s huge, with gigantic shoulders, powerful arms, heavy thighs—not the sharpest knife in Agamemnon’s drawer of fighters, but a big, strong, brave and useful brawler. Thus Elephenor, Chalcodon’s son, thirty-eight years old this past June, commander of the Abantes and Lord of Euboea, drags Echepolus’ corpse behind the screen of thrusting Achaean attackers and begins stripping the body.